Mothers of the Mind

Introduction

We think back through our mothers if we are women.1

When I first read this quotation from Virginia Woolf, as I was viewing an exhibition at the Tate of St Ives, its truth resonated with me. Seeing Virginia's statement alongside a bewitching photograph of her mother, Julia Stephen, I was even more intrigued. As this mesmerising woman's soulful eyes stared out at me from across the century's divide, I wanted to find out who she was. She looked like Virginia, but there was also something elusive about her. I wanted to discover what she was really like and explore her relationship with her daughter.

As I thought about Virginia and Julia, I began to wonder whether the quotation was equally true for other female writers. I soon learnt that the Bloomsbury author was certainly not the only one who was moulded by her maternal heritage; Agatha Christie and Sylvia Plath were also inextricably entwined with their mothers, Clara Miller and Aurelia Plath. Their attitudes to life, literature and feminism were shaped by these formidable women. Virginia argued that not enough had been written about women's relationships with each other and she was right;2 too often in the past, these authors have been defined by their relationships with their lovers rather than their formative affinity with their mothers. And yet, the maternal bond laid the foundation on which they built the rest of their lives, for good or ill.

There have been many previous biographies of Virginia, Agatha and Sylvia, but here for the first time Julia, Clara and Aurelia are put centre stage. They are the leading ladies, their daughters the supporting actresses and rather than just receiving a passing mention, their remarkable life stories are told in full. They deserve to be better known, as they were as passionate, complex, and at times contradictory, as their more famous daughters.

All three mothers were aspiring writers themselves, and by reading what they wrote, rather than just what was written about them, we hear their voices rather than just seeing them through the distorting lenses of other people's eyes. Their voices need to be heard because they were always whispering in their daughters' ears. Exploring their stories, we gain a new insight into the authors and why they developed in the way they did. The importance of these mothers should never be underestimated; Virginia admitted that for much of her life her mother obsessed her; even for three decades after her death, Julia haunted her every step. One Christie biographer portrays Clara as the love of Agatha's life,3 while her daughter Rosalind described her grandmother as a dangerous woman because Agatha never thought she was wrong. A leading Plath scholar claims Sylvia and Aurelia were a team who worked together to achieve literary success.4 However, Sylvia's psychiatrist encouraged the poet to believe that the mother-daughter relationship was at the root of her mental health problems and gave her permission to hate Aurelia.

Looking at the three writers through their mothers provides a new perspective on their lives and work. As a feminist icon, Virginia Woolf's ideas about women's roles can be seen as a rebellion against her anti-feminist mother. While Julia Stephen publicly campaigned against women having the vote, Virginia reacted by fighting for their rights in both the private and public sphere. For Virginia, the personal was political; her mother represented the ideal of Victorian womanhood, the self-sacrificing 'angel in the house' whom she had to 'kill' if she was to survive.

The most controversial moment in Agatha Christie's life is her disappearance in 1926. Usually the break-up of her marriage is seen as the main reason for her breakdown, but was it just the catalyst while the underlying reason was the death of her beloved mother? The answer to this question depends on who was most important to her mental well-being - her husband or her mother? As Agatha's grandson Mathew Prichard notes about the relationship between his grandmother and Clara, 'The closeness with which they lived their lives is self-evident and much closer than the relationship I think most people have with their mothers.'5

Sylvia Plath biographies often focus on her passionate relationship with her husband, Ted Hughes, but her relationship with her mother was equally tempestuous. Aurelia Plath thought she had a close and loving bond with her daughter, but it was only after Sylvia's death that she discovered what she really thought about her. It was devastating to find that the version of their relationship in Sylvia's novel, poems and journals was so different from her affectionate letters home. In Mothers of the Mind Aurelia finally answers back and we learn what she really thought about the way her daughter treated her.

All six women were women who loved too much. They experienced what Agatha Christie described as 'a dangerous intensity of affection', meaning their love for their lovers and each other had the potential to destroy them. The bond between each of the mothers and daughters was uncanny, involving what Aurelia Plath called 'psychic osmosis', which allowed them to imagine themselves into each other's minds. Being so close to another person could be claustrophobic and made it hard to establish a separate identity. In fact, the hyper-sensitivity, intensity, and imagination the daughters inherited from their mothers made them the outstanding writers they became. It gave their work an innate understanding of human relationships and an integrity which made each of the authors so successful in their different genres.6 Their sensitivity made them vulnerable, however, and each of the writers needed a great deal of mothering. When their parents were not there to provide protection, their lovers, friends and family stepped in to fill that role.

The mothers' influence on their daughters' writing was crucial. They were the first to recognise their child's genius and then they did everything they could to help them fulfil that potential. The mothers were their daughters' first teachers, readers and critics. For all three authors, their earliest experiments in writing were to please their mothers. Later, Clara and Aurelia encouraged their daughters to make the transition from amateur to professional writers.7 Once the daughters became famous authors, their mothers inspired some of their most compelling characters. As the people they knew best, all three writers wrote about them in both autobiographical and fictional forms. In her novel To the Lighthouse, Virginia recaptured the spirit of her mother in Mrs Ramsay. In Agatha's fictionalised version of her early life, Unfinished Portrait, the character of Miriam is modelled on Clara. Less flatteringly, Sylvia's unsympathetic portrayal of Mrs Greenwood in her novel The Bell Jar is based on Aurelia. In these works, the writers literally imagined themselves into their mothers' minds, but as Aurelia later angrily explained, her daughter could only write what she thought her mother thought - her true feelings were very different. By finding out who the mothers really were, on their own terms, we discover how closely their daughters' portrayals of them matched the reality.

Observing their family dynamics also helped to form their attitudes to feminism. In the Stephen, Miller and Plath households, lip service was paid to the dominance of men, but in each of the families a matriarchy, made up of generations of strong women, was really in charge. Both Virginia and Sylvia were critical of the sexist status quo which they believed turned their mothers into self-sacrificing martyrs. In contrast to the other authors, Agatha felt no desire to challenge her mother's conventional role. Although she became one of the bestselling authors of all time, she was never a feminist.

The three authors wrote about their mothers and motherhood frequently in their novels, poetry, memoirs, letters and journals. Agatha Christie is best known for her detective stories, but she also wrote six novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott, which are very different from her usual genre. In these complex psychological studies, she explored family relationships in all their complicated forms. The Westmacott novels are windows into Agatha's inner life, and they are examined for the insight they provide into Agatha's attitude to the mother-daughter bond. Sylvia Plath's most famous poems are about her father; who can forget the brutal portrayal of the Nazi in 'Daddy'? However, this book is more interested in her poems about her mother; the pushy mother in 'The Disquieting Muses' and the life-smothering jellyfish in 'Medusa' are equally unforgettable and show how toxic her relationship with Aurelia had become.

The daughters provide only half the material, and they were not the only ones to leave fascinating written sources. Julia wrote children's stories, essays and a book on nursing; Clara penned poems and short stories; Aurelia wrote poems, an academic thesis, and the introduction to her daughter's Letters Home. Reading their mothers' writing helps us to understand where the daughters' talent came from. What was just a seed in one generation grew to fruition in the next.

This book is for admirers of Woolf, Christie and Plath, but it is also for anyone interested in mothers and daughters. Through three very different relationships, written about in separate but interrelating...